Reader I / Occam’s Knife

Two poems by Mihir Bellamkonda

Reader I

Reader gets wide after eating.

Reader taps the tongue against the tooth.

Reader tries and fails to fit inside what her mother calls her.

Reader doesn’t feel the way she wants,

So reader pinches her heart hard in the crutch of a y

And savours the touch: numb centre, pain middle, same dull red outer.

Reader is too big to fit inside the house.

Reader is too big to fit inside the language.

Reader is bursting the seams of the word ineffable,

Even with a shoehorn.

The dictionary cannot cover Reader.

Reader falls asleep in the dry alley of all the world’s small talk,

But ambiguity leaks through an awkward silence

And gets Reader’s socks wet, which she hates.

Reader practices refuge by enunciating.

Reader has left her heart pinched too long in the letter,

And ink has begun to turn the y into a stalactite

On which she bumps her head as she leaves.

Occam’s Knife

She pulled my tenderness from me, pulled

its soft body against the beds of oysters

and lit the remains fluorescent, the better

to clearly see. She named this act science.

A clean working surface is important. A knife

is important. The gesture is most important:

a thrust, a twist, the shell yielding sweetness,

salt, new meat to slide like light into the mind.

With long clean gazes she made of wounds

taxonomies, named the species after open doors.

To remind, to pull back into mind, to dissolve

into a container, to then dissolve the container.

I tell her I am myself falling out of my body,

the world is falling in—she named this act truth.